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bazholifield/README.md

Hi, I'm Baz

Computational linguist in Chicago. I studied linguistics and computational linguistics at Northwestern, then spent a year teaching English in Spain. I build NLP tools for helping people learn and use language, mostly translation, language learning and evaluation.

Current projects

  • TQE Register asks whether translation quality models notice unnatural English, for ESL learners. I built 158 Spanish to English pairs by hand. The best open model catches most of them, but it can't tell formal from casual.
  • FARIA is a voice AI tutor that talks with you at your level and corrects you the way a good teacher would.

How I work

I use Claude to streamline my work. I decide what gets built, design and annotate the data, and judge the results. Claude handles a lot of the code, so I can spend my time on the linguistics.

Stack

Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, scikit-learn, FastAPI, SQL, R

Languages

English and Spanish fluently, French and German comfortably, and a little Arabic, Basque, Hindi, Mandarin and Japanese.

LinkedIn

Pinned Loading

  1. tqe-register tqe-register Public

    Do translation quality-estimation models notice unnatural English? A hand-built Spanish to English test set of 158 natural/unnatural translation pairs across 9 interference categories, with results…

    Python

  2. faria faria Public

    A voice-first AI language tutor with conversation at your level, recasts instead of interruptions, and a per-language learner model (CEFR estimate, recurring errors, spaced review), with a Spanish/…

    Python

  3. spanish-english-transformer spanish-english-transformer Public

    Sequence-to-sequence Transformer for Spanish to English translation, built from scratch in PyTorch with encoder-decoder architecture, SentencePiece BPE tokenizer, beam search decoding, trained on E…

    Python

  4. basque-learning-tool basque-learning-tool Public

    Full-stack Basque language learning app: Flutter desktop frontend, FastAPI backend, and Python NLP layer with spaced repetition (SM-2), similarity-based writing evaluation, and an offline Helsinki-…

    Dart 1

  5. climate-stance-detection climate-stance-detection Public

    Small-scale replication of Luo et al. (2020) transposed to Twitter with DistilBERT stance classifier, POS analysis, and lexicon comparison across 44k climate change tweets.

    Python

  6. esl-error-detection esl-error-detection Public

    Grammar error detector for ESL learners: a fine-tuned DistilBERT classifier combined with rule-based checks to flag errors, identify the offending word, and explain each mistake in plain English. I…

    Python